An evolution in the memory and storage architecture is underway in that solid-state NVM technologies are emerging not only to fill in the existing large performance gap in the memory and storage hierarchy but to blur the distinction between memory and storage. One or more NVMs such as PCRAM and STT-MRAM may eventually replace disks as the most dominant storage media and perhaps even DRAM.
As high performance enterprise applications, such as database that demand very high I/O rates and are characterized by small random R/Ws, have become increasingly important today, NVM systems are expected to best meet the needs of these high-end data-centric applications. Currently, the NVM Storage Controller Project is building a reconfigurable system platform to provide a flexible framework in hardware and software for innovative architectural and algorithmic designs of NVM storage systems, enabling system bandwidth and capacity enhancements, diverse controller designs, system performance measurements, and memory failure analysis.